Fiction or Polemic? Transcending the Ageing Body in Popular Women’s Fiction

Abstract

In this chapter I examine the representation of older female characters in contemporary popular fiction. I do this with reference to social and cultural discourses of ageing, feminist criticism and age studies, and the work of a selection of contemporary women writers of popular fiction from the UK and Australia. I reflect on how they depict ageing heroines and succeed (or otherwise) in relocating traditional relationship-based concerns of romance fiction, to focus on the needs, ambitions and aspirations of the central characters where often the ‘romance’ narrative is displaced or absent. I begin by analysing Elizabeth Buchan’s Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman (2002) and Fanny Blake’s Women of a Dangerous Age (2012). These novels feature women in their late forties and fifties experiencing abrupt and un predicted changes in their personal and professional lives; while their age is not explicitly cited as the cause of these changes, both novels exhibit a consciousness that images of retreat and decline are dominant in culture and that there is no acceptable way to behave as an older woman. The central part of my discussion will consider the fiction and criticism of Liz Byrski, who has spoken out about the near invisibility of older and old women¹ and whose novels explicitly position older women at the heart of the narrative. I will then e xplore re sponse s to agei ng in B ri age t Jo n es : Ma d a b o uttheB oy (2013) and examine whether Helen Fielding succeeds in having Bridget ‘grow up’. In the latest addition to the cycle, Bridget Jones, to the dismay of many, has passed 50 and is no longer the hapless singleton she was in the 1990s. The possible conceptual disjunction between women growing older and women growing up, placed in the context of postfeminism’s tendency to ‘girl’ both women and feminism, will shape the core critique offered in this chapter.